Too Lovely to Work

It was sixty-five degrees today. That's practically seventy!!

Is this really November in Michigan?!?!

Well, in any case, it was far too lovely of a day to spend cooped up inside an office, so I didn't. Besides, there was work to be done at home. Important work.

Oven work.

This is an igniter, specifically a broiler igniter. It's used in those fancy gas stoves that some people out in the Midwest use, where electricity is too expensive. These igniters are kinda like spark plugs; they heat up and 'spark' in order to ignite the gas flame that heats up the top of the oven. Since the oven tries to maintain a specific temperature, the flame goes on and off continually, heating things up for a while, then kicking off when the temperature reaches the right point, then kicking back on when the oven cools down a bit, and so on. So the igniter has to 'spark' many, many times over the course of a single cooking session. Which puts the poor thing through a lot of stress, leading to a kind of breakdown every few years.

Last time we replaced one - it was the main oven igniter - the part and the service call and the labor cost us nearly two hundred dollars. This time, the part alone was a hundred dollars - and the only difference I noticed in the part was in the metal bracket that mounts it. Other than that, they looked identical. Can you say 'scam'?

Well, there's no way I was gonna get ripped off like that again - I mean having someone come out to the house and charge a ridiculous amount of money to put a part in what I could do myself - so Cheryl ordered the part and it showed up the other day, so today - such a gorgeous day! - I went home at lunchtime and put the new part in. And then stayed home and enjoyed the beautiful day. Opened up all the windows and let the fresh, warm air run through the house. Put the plants out by the sliding glass door so they could enjoy it, too. Propped up the tomato plants with a couple sticks to hold on to, since they have grown up so tall and the wind was trying to rip them right out by the roots. Sat at the kitchen table and did work on my laptop (because we geek types love to work remotely from our laptops in order to avoid being interrupted like happens all the time when we're at the office).

It's November. Days like this in November are rare and special, and it's a crime to spend them indoors in a cube farm where there's no fresh, warm breeze and no sunlight. There'll be plenty of that come December. And January. And February. It'll be cold days and even colder nights.

And I still don't have the house all buttoned-up and ready yet. Perhaps another day off would help...